through long centuries of time the
towers of Notre Dame were faintly pencilled in the blue screen of sky.
Oh, fair dream-city, in which the highest passions of the spirit have
found a dwelling-place--with the rankest weeds of vice--in which so
many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for
beauty's sake, in which always there have lived laughter and agony
and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and
where Love has redeemed a thousand crimes, I, though an
Englishman, found tears in my eyes because on that day of history
your beauty was still unspoilt.

Chapter V
The Turn Of The Tide

1

The Germans were baulked of Paris. Even now, looking back on
those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve
to the south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that
they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an
incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and
Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life
as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris--
Paris the great and beautiful--seemed to be within their grasp, and
the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the
French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a
dread proof of German power.

As I have said, all the north-west corner of France was denuded of
troops, with the exception of some poor Territorials, ill-trained and ill-
equipped, and never meant to withstand the crush of Imperial troops
advancing in hordes with masses of artillery, so that they fled like
panic-stricken sheep. The forts of Paris on the western side would not
have held out for half a day against the German guns. All that
feverish activity of trench work was but a pitiable exhibition of an
unprepared defence. The enemy would have swept over them like
a rolling tide. The little British army was still holding together, but it
had lost heavily and was winded after its rapid retreat. The army of
Paris was waiting to fight and would have fought to the death, but
without support from other army corps still a day's journey distant,
its peril would have been great, and if the enemy's right wing had
been hurled with full force against it at the critical moment it might
have been crushed and annihilated. Von Kluck had twenty-four hours
in his favour. If he had been swift to use them before Joffre could
have hurried up his regiments